I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it; SW:TOR is the most entertaining thing out in the MMO space. The latest ‘content patch’ can be found here.

“I didn’t realize the scope until I saw the video for it. I saw the first cut of the video. They had the screens flash with all the features, then I realized we do have a lot of stuff in this game update. I would go so far as to say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen any game with an update that is this epic in scope.

Your creative director did not know what was going into your ‘jesus patch’ until he watched a video for it with the flashy screens? Was some voice actor unavailable to fill him in?

But then, in the next sentence, he suggest that (based on the video?) this might be the most ‘epic’ update in MMO history. Does BioWare understand that they did not invent the MMO genre? Do they also understand that the next MMO they release will be their first? The crap you cut from release, that is, on paper, more of the same trash, is the most ‘epic’ content update in MMO history huh? Love these guys.

“The QA team,” he commented later, “was quite scared when they got the list of things they were going to have to attack and address. “

In other words, the only ‘epic’ thing likely to come from this patch is more /dance ‘features’. Or maybe the QA team was scared because an update requires them to play more SW:TOR? I’d be scared of that too.

The public test server for SWTOR is pretty barren

My Skyrim server is also pretty barren. Not seeing the problem here. What does a chat server being crowded have to do with ones enjoyment of an RPG? And how does the ‘second biggest MMO out’ have a barren server? Is it 1.7m subs, or is it this?

For the future, we are looking at way to make [playing on] the public test server something valuable to do.”

Genre first: test server will now reward gear. Personally I think they should allow you to transfer whatever gear you earned on test to your normal server. One could argue earning gear from buggy content might be unfair, but then to be really fair you would have to wipe everyone now, right? AoE player farming + kill trading es good ya?

I think that getting people to test the content earlier is good because they are going to find things that we will not find here internally

Voice acting is expensive, so rather than hire a decent QA team, please do it for us. We will pay you in lightsabers!

“The number of level 50s is a lot higher than we thought it was going to be.”

Again, if only this genre had about 15 years of history to suggest that players rush through your content to get to the end-game. Unfortunately BioWare is blazing a new trail here, and have only what their awesome statistics show them to go on. The price of being an innovator.

We have a ton of PvE high-level content, but our metrics show that a lot of it hasn’t been consumed by level 50s. Dungeon finder is the key there. That’s one of the reasons that PvP is so popular because PvP is so much easier to get into than PvE. Once I started getting that data I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ I knew that group finder was important. When leveling up, like we found during beta, you don’t really need the group finder, but when you reach the max level, it becomes very important.”

No joke here. Guy beat me to all the punch lines.

We really want to turn the PvP game almost into an e-sport.

So is it an eSport or not? WTF is ‘almost’? Is it like “SW:TOR is almost an MMO”?

“PvP has become one of those things that retains players”

BioWare statistics juggernaut rewriting the MMO book again.

My favorite part of all these BioWare ‘content updates’ is the tone. They always sound like they are talking to a child, explaining why the sky is blue to them. Just so insultingly smug it’s hilarious, especially because the real child is BioWare here.

PS: How great is that heading picture? That face says “I know MMOs, you don’t” like no other.

18 Responses to SW:TOR – 1.2 is amazingly entertaining

Sad part is I have a 6 month sub to this game but haven’t played in a month and have been playing eve for the last few weeks instead.
I would rather grind missions in eve than do things in TOR what is wrong with me!

I don’t really give a damn about SW:ToR, it being a game I never wanted to play, am not playing and probably never will play so generally I’m a bit meh about all the hate. But…

BioWare really do seem to keep doing interviews and sending out press releases that sound as though they created the whole MMO genre out of whole cloth. How they can keep making these statements of the blindingly obvious as if they were epiphanic revelations is beyond me. They surely can’t really be this naive? It has to be a marketing device, doesn’t it?

Of course it’s a marketing device, but if you think that you’re in the target audience, you’re sadly mistaken. In fact, anyone reading this text right now is not a part of the target audience of that marketing blurb.

I mean, seriously guys, sometimes I feel like I’m chatting with people in a pick-up group here. The amount of ignorance is astounding.

In fairness, that is true. Spamming chat channels does nothing to build community, and the dungeon finder is a better tool for organizing groups and getting them into dungeons if that is all the players are interested in. Doing it through a chat channel is just less efficient, it doesn’t make you care any more about the other people in your group, and if you don’t care about them or want to build connections with them, they might as well be random. That isn’t Blizzard’s fault, it’s the players.

That said, if leveling wasn’t so, not only solo friendly, but actively anti-grouping in WoW, a better community might actually develop. If people were forming groups in quest hubs so they could go level together, the dungeon finder wouldn’t even really be necessary, because things would happen more organically. I mean, I remember leveling the first time and ending up in dungeons because I wanted to complete a quest in an area full of elite mobs, once that was done, well, we had a group, and the dungeon was right there, so let’s give it a try. It’s not the dungeon finder that’s the problem, it’s the rest of the damn game that is the problem.

Agreed, Bioware invented MMOs and the look and feel is exactly like that. They do have to seem a clue or two about some MMO specifics like a time-to-level curve, as shown during the guild summit webcast, or a notion that they need money sinks. But that seems to be it.
However, just like Blizzard when they started WOW, they had a good number of players who were Bioware fans, not MMO fans. For that demographic it is all new, including the bugs.

Man, nothing says, “We’re really new at this!” than the quote about the level 50s. I mean, they HAVE people on their team that have made MMOs before. They live in a universe dominated by WoW. How can this be a surprise?